Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease (CJKHD)is a peer-reviewed open access journal which focuses on basic research to clinical research to health services delivery research, in the field of kidney health, acute or chronic kidney diseases, dialysis, kidney transplantation and organ donation. Please see the Aims and Scope tab for further information.

Please see the Submission Guidelines tab for more information on how to submit your article to the journal.

Open access article processing charge (APC) information

Publication in the journal is subject to payment of an article processing charge (APC). The APC serves to support the journal and ensures that articles are freely accessible online in perpetuity under a Creative Commons license.

The APC for this journal varies depending on the article type and membership.

The article processing charge (APC) is payable only if your article is accepted after peer review, before it is published. The APC is subject to taxes where applicable. Tax-exempt status can be indicated by providing appropriate registration numbers when payment is requested. Please see further details here.

Authors currently working in any of the countries listed on the Research4Life A or B list may be eligible for a waiver. Please note that all authors on the manuscript must be from one of these countries to be eligible.

Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease, the official journal of the Canadian Society of Nephrology, is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal that encourages high quality submissions focused on clinical, translational and health services delivery research in the field of chronic kidney disease, dialysis, kidney transplantation and organ donation. Our mandate is to promote and advocate for kidney health as it impacts national and international communities.

Basic science, translational studies and clinical studies will be peer reviewed and processed by an Editorial Board comprised of geographically diverse Canadian and international nephrologists, internists and allied health professionals; this Editorial Board is mandated to ensure highest quality publications.

Philosophy

All journals strive for quality in their publications. To attract those publications, our journal is distinguished by:

1. Supportive review. Our explicit and unique policy is to address our authors as our colleagues, and to aim to improve the work submitted, regardless of our decision to publish. We will be no less scientifically and constructively critical, but we will write to authors as we would wish to be written to ourselves.

2. Clear review. Our associate editors will clearly indicate the major obstacles to publication. We expect authors will respond with openness to feedback, integrity, and clarity, so that most publications will require a single round of scientific revision. Our editors will work to improve the clarity of the peer-review process by identifying additional issues, reconciling conflicting opinions, and highlighting the issues that are most important.

3. Timely review. We will aim to provide authors with a review within 4 weeks of receiving a manuscript, or notify authors of the delay and the proposed timeline if we cannot.

4. Community of science. We explicitly recognise the difficult path that many manuscripts take towards publication, that many manuscripts are not published in the first journal to which they are submitted, and that these realities are part of the nature of the scientific and publishing communities. We recognise the irritation and waste of scientists’ time involved in formatting a paper differently for each journal and we do not think it reflects badly on the quality of our journal or scientists’ work to openly acknowledge that many manuscripts are seen by more than one journal before publication. We therefore aim to minimize the waste of scientific resources on meeting specific formatting criteria at the point of submission. For primary scientific manuscripts we ask for the standard sections –Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, References, Tables, Figures, Supplementary material – and will check ethical issues, but beyond that we have no additional criteria that must be met before peer review. After peer review, if we are advising major or minor revisions, we will ask you to work on formatting at that point, and we will minimize the absolute requirements at that step as well.

5. Timely publication. Delay in author submission of revisions is one of the major obstacles to timely publication. When authors receive supportive feedback within 2 weeks of submission, we anticipate that it will be cognitively easier for them to respond: immediately in many cases. If additional experimental work or complex re-analyses are necessary, there will be an inevitable lapse of time, but we encourage all authors to respond as soon as they are able. Once accepted, work can be published in PDF within 4 weeks.

6. Recognition of limitations. All scientific work is limited. We challenge authors to explicitly recognise the limitations of their own work without fear that it will reduce the likelihood of publication. We will acknowledge limitations in full text and abstracts, and will work with authors to highlight the importance of their findings without overstating them.

7. Openness to creativity and innovation. We would like to hear from you what you would like to read or to write.

8. Open access publication. This translates into work being available, in full text, to anyone with internet access worldwide. This is critical to the dissemination of findings to inform kidney care and research internationally, and particularly important for those working in resource-limited environments. Authors retain the copyright to their published content enabling full rights to reproduce and reuse provided correct attribution is given.

9. Dissemination. We will push monthly summaries of content, with hypertext links to full text, to all members of the Canadian Society of Nephrology and to all registrants at our website. We have an active publicity campaign reaching out through meetings of societies of nephrology, dialysis, hypertension, and transplantation worldwide that will rapidly increase the prominence and readership of the journal. Those who wish can additionally subscribe to RSS feeds that will push each article as published.

The Journal logo, a variation on the tree of knowledge and of life, is symbolic of the ethos of the journal. Through a philosophy of thoughtful and timely reviews of publications, we hope to foster the growth in knowledge, and thus in wellness of patients living with kidney disease.

10. Community of reviewers. We explicitly recognize the importance of peer-reviewers’ time, and that the body of people with expertise to review any particular manuscript is a limited resource. For this reason, for guidelines that have already been through external peer review, and for study protocols that have already undergone external peer review, we do not conduct independent peer review. Instead we ask that previous peer review and response to peer review be submitted along with the manuscript, and critically appraise this process for completeness and integrity.

11. Diversity. We are the journal of the Canadian Society of Nephrology/Société canadienne de néphrology, and aim to reflect the multiple perspectives and inclusiveness of our national society. For feasibility and to aid dissemination, our publications and peer-review processes are conducted in English. Staff and editors at the journal will provide a French abstract for all publications. We explicitly strive for gender and geographic balance in the selection of associate editors, in the editorial board and and among reviewers.

Please read the guidelines below then visit the journal’s submission site to upload your manuscript. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned. Remember you can log in to the submission site at any time to check on the progress of your paper through the peer review process.

Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease will be reviewed.

As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere. Please see our guidelines on prior publication and note that CJKHD will consider submissions of papers that have been posted on preprint servers; please alert the Editorial Office when submitting (contact details are at the end of these guidelines) and include the DOI for the preprint in the designated field in the manuscript submission system. Authors should not post an updated version of their paper on the preprint server while it is being peer reviewed for possible publication in the Journal. If the article is accepted for publication, the author may re-use their work according to the Journal's author archiving policy.

If your paper is accepted, you must include a link on your preprint to the final version of your paper.

Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease is an open access, peer-reviewed journal. Each article accepted by peer review is made freely available online immediately upon publication, is published under a Creative Commons license and will be hosted online in perpetuity. Publication costs of the journal are covered by the collection of article processing charges which are paid by the funder, institution or author of each manuscript upon acceptance. There is no charge for submitting a paper to the journal.

If, after peer review, your manuscript is accepted for publication, a one-time article processing charge (APC) is payable. This APC covers the cost of publication and ensures that your article will be freely available online in perpetuity under a Creative Commons license.

The article processing charge (APC) for Canadian Society of Nephrology members is $1500 USD for all full-length article types. The cost for non-members is $1800 USD. The APC for Research Letters, Research Case Reports, Opinion Pieces, and Educational Case Reports is $750 USD. The cost for nonmembers is $900.

Authors currently working in any of the countries listed on the Research4Life A or B list may be eligible for a waiver. Please note that all authors on the manuscript must be from one of these countries to be eligible.

These should consist of one or two paragraphs totaling no more than 500 words, no abstract, no subheadings and fewer than 8 references (one author, et al., no titles). If an abstract is included, it will automatically be made the first paragraph. Letters should not include figures or research material. Letters to the Editor are not charged an APC.

A letter to the editor is a brief communication that addresses the contents of a published article. Its purpose is to make corrections, provide alternative viewpoints, or offer counter arguments. Avoid logical fallacies and ad hominem attacks. Letters to the editor must be written in a professional tone and include references to support all claims if appropriate.

3.3 Writing your paper

The SAGE Author Gateway has some general advice and on how to get published, plus links to further resources.

Following a preliminary triage to eliminate submissions unsuitable for Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease all papers are sent out for review. The covering letter is important. To help the Editor in his preliminary evaluation, please indicate why you think the paper suitable for publication. If your paper should be considered for fast-track publication, please explain why.

The journal’s policy is to have manuscripts reviewed by two expert reviewers. Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease utilizes a single-blind peer review process in which the reviewer’s name and information is withheld from the author. Reviewers may at their own discretion opt to reveal their names to the author in their review but our standard policy practice is for their identities to remain concealed. All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible, while maintaining rigor. Reviewers make comments to the author and recommendations to the associate editor, who consults the handling deputy editor, and a decision is reached by consensus between the associate and deputy editors.

The Editor or members of the Editorial Board may occasionally submit their own manuscripts for possible publication in the journal. In these cases, the peer review process will be managed by alternative members of the Board and the submitting Editor / Board member will have no involvement in the decision-making process.

Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease is committed to delivering high quality, fast peer review for your paper, and as such has partnered with Publons. Publons is a third party service that seeks to track, verify and give credit for peer review. Reviewers for Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease can opt in to Publons in order to claim their reviews or have them automatically verified and added to their reviewer profile. Reviewers claiming credit for their review will be associated with the relevant journal, but the article name, reviewer’s decision and the content of their review is not published on the site. For more information visit the Publons website.

4.2 Authorship

Papers should only be submitted for consideration once consent is given by all contributing authors. Those submitting papers should carefully check that all those whose work contributed to the paper are acknowledged as contributing authors. The list of authors should include all those who can legitimately claim authorship. This is all those who:

(i) Made a substantial contribution to the concept or design of the work; or acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data,
(ii) Drafted the article or revised it critically for important intellectual content,
(iii) Approved the version to be published,
(iv) Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. Authors should meet the conditions of all of the points above. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

When a large, multicentre group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship, although all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. Please refer to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) authorship guidelines for more information on authorship.

4.3 Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.

4.3.1 Writing assistance

Individuals who provided writing assistance, e.g. from a specialist communications company, do not qualify as authors and so should be included in the Acknowledgements section. Authors must disclose any writing assistance – including the individual’s name, company and level of input – and identify the entity that paid for this assistance.

It is not necessary to disclose use of language polishing services.

Any acknowledgements should appear first at the end of your article prior to your Declaration of Conflicting Interests (if applicable), any notes and your References.

4.4 Funding

Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease requires all authors to acknowledge their funding in a consistent fashion under a separate heading. Please visit the Funding Acknowledgements page on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway to confirm the format of the acknowledgment text in the event of funding, or state that: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

4.5 Declaration of conflicting interests

It is the policy of Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease to require a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors enabling a statement to be carried within the paginated pages of all published articles.

Please ensure that a ‘Declaration of Conflicting Interests’ statement is included at the end of your manuscript, after any acknowledgements and prior to the references. If no conflict exists, please state that ‘The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest’.

For research articles, authors are also required to state in the methods section whether participants provided informed consent and whether the consent was written or verbal. Information on informed consent to report individual cases or case series should be included in the manuscript text. A statement is required regarding whether written informed consent for patient information and images to be published was provided by the patient(s) or a legally authorized representative.

Information on informed consent to report individual cases or case series should be included in the manuscript text. A statement is required regarding whether written informed consent for patient information and images to be published was provided by the patient(s) or a legally authorized representative. Please do not submit the patient’s actual written informed consent with your article, as this in itself breaches the patient’s confidentiality. The Journal requests that you confirm to us, in writing, that you have obtained written informed consent but the written consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves, for example in a patient’s hospital record. The confirmatory letter may be uploaded with your submission as a separate file.

Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease conforms to the ICMJE requirement that clinical trials are registered in a WHO-approved public trials registry at or before the time of first patient enrolment as a condition of consideration for publication. The trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract.

4.8 Reporting guidelines

The relevant EQUATOR Network reporting guidelines should be followed depending on the type of study. For example, all randomized controlled trials submitted for publication should include a completed CONSORT flow chart as a cited figure and the completed CONSORT checklist should be uploaded with your submission as a supplementary file. Systematic reviews and metaanalyses should include the completed PRISMA flow chart as a cited figure and the completed PRISMA checklist should be uploaded with your submission as a supplementary file. The EQUATOR wizard can help you identify the appropriate guideline.

At SAGE we are committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research. Where relevant, Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease encourages authors to share their research data in a suitable public repository subject to ethical considerations and to include a data accessibility statement in their manuscript file. Authors should also follow data citation principles. For more information please visit the SAGE Author Gateway, which includes information about SAGE’s partnership with the data repository Figshare.

Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease and SAGE take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action.

5.1.2 Prior publication

If material has been previously published, it is not generally acceptable for publication in a SAGE journal. However, there are certain circumstances where previously published material can be considered for publication. Please refer to the guidance on the SAGE Author Gateway or if in doubt, contact the Editor at the address given below.

On first review, we are very flexible about the format of the manuscript in order to facilitate reviews of manuscripts that have been prepared without our journal in mind or which have been previously submitted and declined elsewhere. If a manuscript has standard or sensible structure and meets ethical standards, we will send it to an associate editor for consideration for peer review without requesting formatting revisions.

However, if you are preparing the manuscript specifically for CJKHD, please follow these guidelines as you develop your work in order to save effort, should it be accepted after peer review.

Once we have received peer review, if your manuscript is potentially eligible for publication after revision, you will receive:

1. Comments from the editorial team
2. Peer review, usually from 2 peer reviewers
3. A reminder to check these guidelines for formatting instructions

When submitting a revision, respond point-by-point to each editor and reviewer comment, and to the formatting revisions. Please upload your point-by-point response, a red-line manuscript, and a clean manuscript, and red-line and clean versions of any tables or supplementary material that has changed, along with publication-quality figures.

We hope that this work-flow will reduce the time wasted in formatting and, for many manuscripts, allow a single round of revisions that covers scientific and formatting issues.

6.1 CJKHD policy on language for referring to patients

Please do not use the names of diseases as an adjective to describe patients: do not write 'dialysis patients', 'diabetic patients', 'transplant patients' or 'diabetics.'

Please use the 'maintenance dialysis' rather than 'chronic dialysis', for example, 'patients treated with maintenance dialysis.'

For patients who have a functioning kidney transplant or who are on dialysis, please use ‘kidney replacement therapy (KRT)' rather than ESRD or ESKD, for example 'patients treated with kidney replacement therapy.'

ESRD and ESKD may still be used where the term retains its administrative meaning. For example, ESRD should be used to refer to the US Medicare program, and ESKD to statistics from the Canadian Organ Replacement Registry (CORR).

Uses 2012 KDIGO terminology for categories of CKD. Do not refer to 'stages' of CKD.

G for GFR category

A for albuminuria category

D for patients treated with maintenance dialysis

ND for patients not treated with maintenance dialysis

T for patients with functioning kidney transplants

Here are some examples of how to use this classification in text:

CKD G3 = category G3, not including patients with functioning transplants. Note the preferred order, which CKD G3 rather than G3 CKD, chosen for consistency.

CKD G3-5D = category G3, or G4, or G5 not treated with maintenance dialysis, or G5 treated with maintenance dialysis. Note that this category includes G5ND, which is implied because of the inclusion of the higher G categories.

In the absence of an accepted term for patients with CKD G5ND who are undergoing conservative care (ie, after an informed decision making process, do not plan to undergo maintenance dialysis, whatever their kidney function or symptoms), please use CKD G5C and define it carefully in your work.

Wherever possible, we prefer 'kidney' to 'renal' or derivatives of 'nephro.'

The terms 'nephrology' or 'renal medicine' can be used if referring to a specific geographic region where this is the correct term for the discipline. Otherwise, we prefer, for example, 'kidney medicine', 'kidney health care providers', 'kidney nurse practitioners', and 'kidney doctors' or 'kidney specialist physicians.'

6.2 Word processing formats

The preferred format for your manuscript is Word, RTF, or XLS. LaTeX files are also accepted. The text should be double-spaced throughout and with a minimum of 3cm for left and right hand margins and 5cm at head and foot. Text should be standard 10 or 12 point. Word and (La)Tex templates are available on the Manuscript Submission Guidelines page of our Author Gateway.

This journal is able to host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc) alongside the full-text of the article. For more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplemental files.

6.5 Reference style

Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease adheres to the SAGE Vancouver reference style. Please review the guidelines on SAGE Vancouver to ensure your manuscript conforms to this reference style.

Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease is hosted on SAGE Track, a web based online submission and peer review system powered by ScholarOne™ Manuscripts. Visit https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cjkhd to login and submit your article online.

IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in the system before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created. For further guidance on submitting your manuscript online please visit ScholarOne Online Help.

7.2 Title, keywords and abstracts

Please supply a title, short title, an abstract and keywords to accompany your article. The title, keywords and abstract are key to ensuring readers find your article online through online search engines such as Google. Please refer to the information and guidance on how best to title your article, write your abstract and select your keywords by visiting the SAGE Journal Author Gateway for guidelines on How to Help Readers Find Your Article Online.

7.3 Information required for completing your submission

Provide full contact details for the corresponding author including email, mailing address and telephone numbers. Academic affiliations are required for all co-authors. These details should be presented separately to the main text of the article to facilitate anonymous peer review.

You will be asked to provide contact details and academic affiliations for all co-authors via the submission system and identify who is to be the corresponding author. These details must match what appears on your manuscript. The affiliation listed on the manuscript should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a manuscript note at the end of the paper. At this stage please ensure you have included all the required statements and declarations and uploaded any additional supplementary files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).

7.4 ORCID

As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process SAGE is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.

The collection of ORCID iDs from corresponding authors is now part of the submission process of this journal. If you already have an ORCID iD you will be asked to associate that to your submission during the online submission process. We also strongly encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID ID to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. Your ORCID iD will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID iD is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.

If you do not already have an ORCID iD please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.

7.5 Permissions

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.

If your paper is accepted for publication after peer review, you will first be asked to complete the contributor’s publishing agreement. Once your manuscript files have been check for SAGE Production, the corresponding author will be asked to pay the article processing charge (APC) via a payment link. Once the APC has been processed, your article will be prepared for publication and can appear online within an average of 30 days. Please note that no production work will occur on your paper until the APC has been received.

8.1 SAGE Production

Your SAGE Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will made available to the corresponding author via our editing portal SAGE Edit, or by email to the corresponding author and should be returned promptly. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate. Please note that if there are any changes to the author list at this stage all authors will be required to complete and sign a form authorizing the change.

8.2 Online publication

One of the many benefits of publishing your research in an open access journal is the speed to publication. With no page count constraints, your article will be published online in a fully citable form with a DOI number as soon as it has completed the production process. At this time it will be completely free to view and download for all.

8.3 Promoting your article

Publication is not the end of the process! You can help disseminate your paper and ensure it is as widely read and cited as possible. The SAGE Author Gateway has numerous resources to help you promote your work. Visit the Promote Your Article page on the Gateway for tips and advice.

Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the Manuscript Submission process should be sent to the Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease editorial office as follows: Katie.Willis@sagepub.com, T: (805) 410-7689